Disclosed herein are various micro electromechanical stage systems that provide flexible positioning with high precision that are readily manufactured using silicon-on-insulator processing techniques.
MEMS is the technology of the very small and are made up of components between 10 to 100 micrometers in size (i.e. 0.01 to 0.1 mm) and MEMS devices generally range in size from a 20 micrometers (20 millionth of a meter) to a millimeter (thousandth of a meter). MEMS include a central unit that processes data, the microprocessor and several components that interact with the outside. Due to MEMS' large surface area to volume ratio, surface effects such as electrostatics and wetting dominate volume effects such as inertia or thermal mass. MEMS are practical because they are fabricated using modified semiconductor fabrication technologies, normally used to make electronics. These include molding and plating, wet etching and dry etching (RIE and DRIE), electro discharge machining, and other technologies capable of manufacturing very small devices. MEMS technology can be implemented using a number of different materials such as silicon and different processing techniques. Silicon has significant advantages due to its material properties. In single crystal form, when silicon is flexed there is virtually no hysteresis and almost no energy dissipation. Silicon is also very reliable because it suffers very little fatigue and can have service lifetimes in the range of billions to trillions of cycles without breaking. Basic production techniques for producing silicon-based MEMS devices include deposition of material layers, patterning of layers by photolithography and/or etching to produce patterns and desired shapes.
MEMS and NEMS (nano-electromechanical systems) have been used in various positioning devices such as in microscopy, micro-assembly, nano-assembly and in probing, characterization, imaging, testing, manipulation and assembly. Accurate, reliable, and fast positioning can be critical in these applications. Provided herein are various positioning systems that achieve these goals that are also relatively straight-forward to produce and use.